Just after dawn on a recent Saturday, Elsa Coria walked the beach in San Carlos, Sonora, with her eyes to the ground.
She spends most mornings on this half moon of sand searching for the tell-tale sea turtle tracks that could lead her to a nest.
“One of the biggest problems we have are the vehicles,” Coria said on a beach crisscrossed with another kind of tracks — the imprints of four-wheeler and truck tires.
Even before 7 a.m., beachgoers start arriving at Playa San Francisco to enjoy a morning swim or set up chairs. The appeal of this spot is clear: the long, sandy beach curves around a bay cradled by dramatic rock formations, ending in the warm blue waters of the Gulf of California.
The relatively undeveloped Playa San Francisco is a quieter spot for visitors compared to those in the bustling tourist town of San Carlos.
But it's a busy spot nonetheless. It's why wildlife veterinarian Coria and the group of volunteers she leads remove the sea turtle nests they find at the beach, bringing the eggs elsewhere to incubate. Coria fears a state project to bring even more visitors to this stretch of sand threatens one of Sonora’s most important nesting sites for endangered olive ridley sea turtles.
On the other side of the shrubby dunes, a wide swath of sand cleared of grasses and wetland vegetation has become a broad beige rectangle. Construction trucks are plowing further into the green expanse.
This will become a 300-car parking lot, Coria said, for visitors to a new mile-and-a-half-long walkway along this beach at a cost of more than $30 million.
Sonoran Gov. Alfonso Durazo’s administration has already built two similar walkways — which include bike paths and park areas — along other beaches in the state. State officials hope the infrastructure will drive tourism and boost the economy.
Durazo has sought to scale up tourism in Sonora, as his party looks to boost the economy and hold the governorship in next year's elections.
“With more tourist infrastructure, Sonora transforms,” Durazo said in a recent video on his social media.
But in the year since the Playa San Francisco walkway was announced, Coria says her group was shut out of the planning process as they raised concerns about what the project could mean for the olive ridley sea turtles that nest there. The species is classified as endangered on Mexico’s Pacific coast.
The state of Sonora and Mexico’s environmental agency did not respond to requests for comment from KJZZ.
Coria fears the increase in visitors to the beach where 60% of the municipalities’ sea turtle nests are found could further interrupt the delicate nesting process. More vehicles, campfires and curious visitors could endanger nesting sites, she said.
“It will mean more people, more trash, more disturbances,” Coria said. Plus, turtles sometimes nest up as far as the dunes where the walkway will stretch, she says.
The state, she feels, hasn’t listened to those concerns in their planning. Her group, Centro de Rescate Rehabilitación e Investigación de Fauna Silvestre — or the Center for Wildlife Rescue, Rehabilitation and Research — suggested ideas to make the project more turtle-friendly, such as lighting that points away from the sea to avoid disrupting the animals’ sensitive navigation systems.
She doesn’t know if the suggestions are part of the final plan.
“It makes me feel so sad, so helpless,” Coria said through tears, standing on the dune overlooking the construction site.
Later that day, Coria carefully opened a styrofoam cooler in a temperature-controlled trailer-turned-incubation-center to reveal a nest of golf-ball-sized eggs buried in sand. The eggs incubate in this dark room for around 45 days before they hatch and are released.
In a plastic box on the ground outside the center, 95 day-old ridley sea turtles clambered over one another. Each of the identical dark-gray hatchlings could fit in the palm of a child’s hand.
Volunteers loaded the box in their car and headed to Playa San Francisco, where the hatchlings’ mother laid their nest more than a month ago before shuffling back into the sea.
As they set up a perimeter, curious beachgoers started to gather.
“It’s the first sea turtle release of the nesting season,” Coria told the throngs of visitors over a megaphone. “This beach is a treasure. It’s important that we care for it and protect it.”
Two by two, children stood in line to scoop a baby turtle from the box with a coconut shell and place it gently onto the sand.
The hatchlings used their tiny, brand-new flippers to drag themselves down the beach and into the surf. Statistically, only one in a thousand survive. Coria says the volunteers’ intervention triples those odds.
After more than a decade at sea, any surviving females will return to this beach to lay their eggs. Coria hopes they’ll have a safe place to come back to.
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